Field of Invention
The present invention relates to virtualization technology, and, more particularly to collecting Guest OS statistics by the host OS Task Manager.
Background Art
With Virtual Machine (VM) technology, a user can create and run multiple operating environments on a Host server at the same time. Each Virtual Machine requires its own guest operating system (GOS) and can run applications independently. The VMM software provides a layer between the computing, storage, and networking hardware and the software that runs on it.
Each VM acts as a separate execution environment, which reduces risk and allows developers to quickly re-create different operating system (OS) configurations or compare versions of applications designed for different OS's for as long as the integrity of data used by each of the VMs is provided. Generally, a Virtual Machine is an environment that is launched on a particular processor (a client machine) that is running a host operating system (HOS) and the VM runs the Guest OS.
Collecting task execution statistics by a Task Manager (in Windows) is performed in order to optimize system resource utilization. Typically, a user wants to know which tasks take up a lot of CPU time. However, when the tasks are executed within a VM, it is difficult to determine from the outside which particular task occupies CPU resources.
The Host system can only see that the VM execution takes a certain amount of CPU time, but it cannot determine which VM processes (tasks) individually take CPU time. For example, the VM can run a number of applications (e.g., MS WORD, MS EXCEL, Internet Explorer), but the exact percentage of CPU time used by each application is not known to the host OS Task Manager. The only way to collect execution statistics of the VM processes is to create a virtual Task Manager that runs under the Guest OS and monitors the processes and resource usage within the VM. However, there are no existing means for reflecting the VM execution statistics collected by the Guest Task Manager into the Host system Task Manager so the Host Task Manager provides aggregated Guest and Host statistics to the user.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method for collecting Guest OS statistics by the host OS Task Manager.